Critics reviews

For all these major and minor changes, this director's cut is still essentially the "Blackhat" we all know and (some people) love: it's occasionally clumsy and silly, but nevertheless full of formal beauty that suggest an ocean of thematic subtext. I didn't necessarily come away feeling like I had experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion to the "Blackhat" cause, but at the very least the director's cut brought the film's already considerable virtues into sharper relief.

Blackhat's decimating penultimate action sequence gunshots and bullet impacts carry the weight of sledgehammers, thundercracks followed by hurtled bodies, instantly killed. The more freeform, spontaneous, dancing camerawork of Blackhat lets us feel the physicality of the camera: it reacts, it adapts, we are aware of its presence, and perhaps its complicity poised at Mann's mythological forefront of work and longing.

I count myself among its fervid cult. Boring gripes about unbelievability and Chris Hemsworth's inappropriate chiseled-ness and slippery accent seemed to make up much of the criticism, though Mann's slick and considered digital style (refined since 2004's Collateral) and balletic open-air action scenes are as strong as anything in Miami Vice (2006).

An impressionistic smear of our hyper-connected age, with gunfights. Leonine Australian hunk Chris Hemsworth makes for an unconvincing hacker, but this is a movie in which the small details seem absurd but the grand gestures are entirely, overwhelmingly convincing.

Mann has become an increasingly abstract filmmaker over the years: For him, the dance of images, sounds, and textures is as important, if not more so, than the typical interplay of characters and dialogue. As Blackhat hops across the globe from city to city, Mann creates a world of grids and dense, repeating designs, as if the film's very reality has absorbed the microscopic patterns of the digital world.

For a good, solid, driven female character with her own agenda and agency, Carol Barrett, played by Viola Davis is a prime example. She makes no statements, she just does her thing, and she also happens to be black without this ever being made a deal... as such she is both a post-feminist and a post-racial character in a world which is neither. In a film with many qualities the characters it portrays are its strongest points, and Carol Barrett is its strongest of them. She is a joy to behold.

All this whiz-bang circuitry serves as the basis for another of Mann's inky, nightmarish meditations on human moral constructs that are coldly collapsing in on themselves. As such, it's considerably better than its reputation – all scuzzy, interference-ridden atmosphere, rendered in aggressive digital strokes, and Mann's most vivid work since The Insider 16 years ago.

To these eyes, the film's opening, CG-assisted plunge into continent-crossing circuitry—and a later shot looking up from within a keyboard as Hemsworth's beefy fingers rattle away on it—are rather desperate, mildly risible attempts to visualize the work of computer-hacking as work; as with any other wearisome Hollywood thriller, Blackhat's hackery is mainly a matter of a few magic-finger keystrokes and voilà.

Everything that enters a body, whether it's a bullet or a screwdriver, is visceral... No matter how far our imagination and abstractions takes us, we can't leave this tangible and fragile thing we call the body. A bit likes what Yeats writes in "Sailing To Byzantium": "Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress". And how mortal it is in "Blackhat"! Every body we know closely (except two) is killed before the end, and none of these deaths is taken lightly.

This is a square-jawed, furrowed-browed, altogether joyless film, with a hero to match: there are few sights in recent cinema more self-importantly unpleasant than a dour Hemsworth striding in slo-mo through crowds in Jakarta, slapping aside pesky Indonesians who get in his way. And Mann's favoured hi-def digital look, which seemed so fresh in 2004's Collateral, has a nasty metallic drabness that does the film no favours.

Blackhat is less interested in handing us a cackling Joker-style villain and observing a wily game of cat-and-mouse than it is leaving us to ponder exactly who or what is the malevolent force causing all this wireless destruction. It's a film which is interested in spectacle, but only within the context of reality. Oftentimes, reality _is_ the spectacle, depending on how we look at it.

I couldn't avoid writing on Blackhat, a film that I found as viscerally and formally thrilling as anything I've seen at the cinema in recent memory (and that includes Adieu au langage). I've seen it three times and plan to see it at least once more on the big screen before its (likely brief, considering its box office numbers) run ends. It has taken me multiple viewings to get closer to understanding all of Blackhat's moving parts, a journey in itself that I eagerly plan to continue.